Authors: James Booth
A score
Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales [. . .]
The suggestion that capitalist greed might be as environmentally destructive as better pay for the working class proved too much for the Countess and her Committee. Larkin wrote to Conquest in May 1972: ‘Have you seen this commissioned poem I did for the Countess of Dartmouth’s report on the human habitat? It makes my flesh creep. She made me cut out a verse attacking big business – don’t tell anyone. It was a pretty crappy verse, anyway, not that she minded that.’
41
When the poem appeared in
High Windows
the offending lines were restored. He described the poem to Charles Monteith as ‘thin ranting conventional gruel’.
42
The drafts of this piece of ‘required writing’ had run across the end of the seventh workbook, and on to the first three pages of the eighth and – as he must have realized – last. Then, on the fourth page of the new book, on 13 January 1972, he began the confident draft of a new ‘inspired’, rather than ‘required’, poem. ‘The Meeting House’ was different from, and more ambitious than, anything he had attempted since ‘Dockery and Son’ and the ill-fated ‘The Dance’ almost a decade earlier. After four pages devoted to the new poem he forced himself to return to the commissioned piece on 24 January, but was uncomfortable at having to ‘cut across’ his new inspiration with ‘thinking about the environment’.
43
The new extended elegy, soon renamed ‘The Building’, showed a return from the intertextuality and symbolism of his recent works to the more direct and universal lyric mode of his
Whitsun Weddings
style. It was to usher in the last great flowering of his genius.
20
1972–4
On 24 January 1972, the day before Larkin completed ‘Going, Going’, his mother fell and cracked a bone in her leg. It was no longer possible for her to stay in her own home. On 30 January Larkin and his sister Kitty looked over Berrystead Nursing Home on the London Road between Leicester and Loughborough, and on 2 February Eva made her final move.
1
A week later, on 9 February, Larkin completed ‘The Building’. It had been almost nine years since he had been confident enough to address a wider audience in one of the long Keatsian odes or reflective elegies which had formed the backbone of his early work (‘At Grass’, ‘Church Going’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Here’, ‘Dockery and Son’). Now he resumed the sequence, and over the next six years would complete four more, all focused directly or indirectly on the theme of death: ‘The Building’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘Show Saturday’ and finally ‘Aubade’.
Since his forty-fifth-birthday poem, ‘Sympathy in White Major’, Larkin’s poems had been distilled intertextually from earlier literature or art, or had evoked a reified historical past or an exotic location. Now he returned to the contemporary social scene of his middle-period work. But the modulations are more abrupt and the tone harder. In ‘The Building’ the poet struggles to assert an elevated poetic register against the drag of despondent prose; or his idiom fuses the flatly literal and romantically poetic together. This strange effect is seen in the footnote, isolated at the bottom of the second page of drafting: ‘We must never die. No one must ever die.’
2
The businesslike imperative is contradicted by embarrassingly ingenuous emotion and naive repetition. The opening simile of the poem has a similarly mixed tone. It sounds rhetorically confident: ‘Higher than the handsomest hotel’. But the aspirated ‘h’ alliteration gasps exhaustedly.
3
The phrase ‘lucent [honey]comb’ strikes a rich Keatsian note, but is also an exact photographic description of the yellow-lit Hull Royal Infirmary on the Anlaby Road.
4
A strained elevation is maintained in the description of the ‘close-ribbed’ streets: ‘Like a great sigh out of the last century’. But towards the end of the stanza the poet’s figurative nerve collapses: into flat description (‘The porters are scruffy’), superstitious circumlocution (‘not taxis’) and the gallows humour of zeugma (‘in the hall / As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell’).
Prosy description follows: ‘There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup.’ Then the tone becomes more detached and impersonal with the stumble of a loosely appositional noun phrase: ‘Humans, caught / On ground curiously neutral’. The chillingly abstract noun ‘Humans’, used here for the only time in a serious mature poem, strips the people of their families and fashions.
5
Faced with biological extinction, only the fundamentals remain. Two crushing noun phrases rub in the point with the same repeated grammar and rhythm: ‘The end of choice, the last of hope’, an effect so Larkinesque as to border on self-parody. Poetic metaphor flickers back into life with a variation on Larkin’s familiar room imagery. The ‘rooms’ of ‘The Building’ are at the same time more literal than the attics, dens or towers of his recent symbolist poems, but also more awesome: ‘rooms, and rooms past those, / And more rooms yet, each one further off // And harder to return from’. These oubliettes offer the same escape from the self which the poet longed for in the ‘padlocked cube of light’ in ‘Dry-Point’ and the attics of ‘shoreless day’ in ‘Absences’. But in this context of reductive biology the surrender to extinction brings no euphoria.
In stanzas six and seven metaphor stands on its head as the ‘real’, dull ordinary world takes on the glowing inaccessibility of a Grecian urn or mythical Byzantium: ‘Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking [. . .] / Out to the car park, free’. Outside lies the gorgeous normality of traffic, terraced streets and, in an elegiac metonym of life as glamorous as anything in Keats or Yeats, ‘girls with hair-dos’ fetching their separates from the cleaners. This achingly poignant evocation of the loveliness of everyday things prompts an impassioned apostrophe which no other twentieth-century poet could have risked:
O world,
Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch
Of any hand from here!
6
In the building the solid, accessible world of humdrum normality has become ‘unreal’, ‘A touching dream’ of togetherness, from which we all ‘wake [. . .] separately’. Reality awaits us after we are ‘borne across’ into the metaphorical world of extinction. Towards the end of the poem the language descends again to prose: ‘Each gets up and goes / At last. Some will be out by lunch [. . .]’ In a wan parody of the elect ascending to heaven the others go to join the ‘unseen congregations whose white rows / Lie set apart above’.
In the past we tried to keep our ‘thought of dying’ at bay through faith. Now, though secular medicine may outbuild cathedrals:
nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.
Superstitious propitiation is useless, as are gestures of love and sympathy. The language combines the formal Latinate eloquence of ‘contravenes’ and ‘propitiatory’ with the homely Anglo-Saxon plainness of ‘dark’, ‘weak’ and ‘wasteful’. The ‘w’ alliteration has a hint of exasperation and, after the emotional stammer of the cluttered polysyllable ‘propitiatory’ the voice falls, in a Mozartean diminuendo, to the open vowel of ‘flowers’.
‘The Building’ adopts a roomy stanza of regular interwoven rhyme characteristic of Larkin’s earlier reflective odes. But there is a hidden complication. The eight-line rhyme-scheme (abcbdcad) naturally suggests regular eight-line stanzas. Wilfully, however, the stanzas are only seven lines long. Thus the rhyme-scheme completes itself at line 1 of stanza two, at line two of stanza three, at line three of stanza four, and so on. It is not until the eighth stanza that the completion of the rhyme scheme coincides, for the first time, with the end of the stanza. But, instead of concluding here, Larkin adds a further, ninth stanza, necessitating a final single isolated line to complete the scheme. It is difficult to imagine any reader actually hearing this. Larkin is playing a private game, like the numerological patterns or acrostics of medieval poetry and music. But it is a game on which he has expended a great deal of imaginative energy. I have argued elsewhere that this device could be seen as leading the reader through a suite of similar rooms, each different from the last and with confusingly rearranged furniture.
7
Alternatively, the slippage between stanza and rhyme could be felt to throw the poem off balance, resulting in a game of catch-up as the initial ‘a’ rhyme of each abcbdcad rhyme-unit moves down the order in each succeeding stanza, hidden (like an undiagnosed cancer?) to take its final form as ‘die’ at the beginning of the ninth. It seems relevant here that the nine seven-line stanzas bring the poem to its sixty-third line. In his fiftieth year, Larkin was already certain that he would die at sixty-three, the same age as his father. The hopeful mathematics of this poem force the poem beyond that limit into a sixty-fourth line. However, like the wasteful and weak flowers themselves, this superstitious magic is pathetically ineffective.
Larkin followed this poem, just under a month later, with a more direct response to his mother’s plight, ‘Heads in the Women’s Ward’, drafted on a single page dated 6 March 1972. The poet describes the senile heads in crisp couplets: the staring eyes, the taut tendons, the bearded mouths talking silently. A sixty-year perspective returns them to their youth, when they smiled ‘At lover, husband, first-born child’. But time and place are now different:
Smiles are for youth. For old age come
Death’s terror and delirium.
The rhythm suggests a nursery rhyme suitable for recitation by those in their ‘second childhood’. He published the poem immediately, placing it in the Rationalist Association’s journal
New Humanist
(May 1972), which has been campaigning on behalf of scepticism since 1885.
Larkin was deeply affected by his mother’s loss of independence. He wrote to Barbara Pym in March, reluctantly conceding that Eva would never now return to her own home: ‘it’s clear she can’t go back to living, as she did, more or less on her own. Indeed I wonder if she will ever emerge from the Nursing Home [. . .] since Christmas I have been going back there on Saturday & returning Sunday, which leaves considerably less time than usual for letters.’
8
In May, to add to his gloom, Cecil Day-Lewis died. Larkin had visited him days before the end, and had shown him the Sonus Press publication of Joan Barton’s
The Mistress
. Despite his condition Day-Lewis had gone to the trouble of reading the poems and dictating a complimentary letter to the author. Larkin was chastened at this generosity of spirit: ‘Catch me doing that. I really think he was a nice man.’
9
In the same letter to Conquest he briefly reflected on Roy Fuller as a possible successor to Day-Lewis as Laureate. Had he himself been offered the post at this point, he would have accepted.
10
In the event Betjeman was appointed. In June 1972 Larkin allowed Anthony Thwaite to persuade him to make a rare ‘personal appearance’ during his visit to the University of East Anglia for a SCONUL conference. He commented apprehensively, ‘The awful thing is that people may be expecting too much – a combination of Rupert Brooke, Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot, instead of which they get bald deaf bicycle-clipped Larkin, the Laforgue of Pearson Park.’
11
He is echoing Dylan Thomas’s description of himself as ‘the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’.
Unusually, ‘The View’, his fiftieth-birthday poem, was drafted almost entirely outside the workbook. Larkin dramatizes his feelings with the zestful gusto of a stand-up comedian. In a wildly inappropriate image he depicts himself as an ‘overweight and shifty’ mountain climber, ascending the peak of age. His weight was by this time fifteen stone. Experienced climbers assure him that the view is ‘fine from fifty’. He should expect: ‘fields and snowcaps / And flowered lanes that twist’. But having reached this vantage point he is disappointed to find that, beyond his toecaps, the track ‘drops away in mist’. A fifth line tacked on to each quatrain turns the knife with a third malicious recurrence of the rhyme. ‘The view does not exist’ gives the unmistakable cue for a pantomimic shrug.
12
Short-syllable throwaway rhymes (‘twist / mist / exist’) alternate with grotesque double rhymes (‘fifty / shifty; snowcaps / toe-caps; lifetime / unwifed, I’m’). The flow runs clear only in the pensive open vowels of the final rhyme (‘drear / clear / near’):